Since I’m still angry about the Republicans accusing Senate Dems of anti-Catholic bigotry, I wanted to alert you to an excellent op-ed on the issue by Ellen Goodman (which was brought to my attention by a loyal Carpetbagger reader; let’s call her Madre.)
Goodman summarized the Pryor attacks nicely: “So it takes an ecumenical group of zealots charging anti-Catholicism in an ad running in a state with a Greek Orthodox senator to make me fully understand the word chutzpah.”
Goodman also noted the irony of having non-Catholics on the Senate Judiciary Committee parse the difference between good Catholics and bad based on whether they agreed with the church’s positions on issues such as abortion and gay rights.
“Ironically, the folks parsing good Catholics from bad Catholics seem to pick and choose their own papal line,” Goodman notes. “Consider, for example, the Vatican opposition to the death penalty. Not to mention the war in Iraq. Is a pro-war Catholic ‘bad’?”